Ever more stringent regulatory requirements relating to permissible pollutant emissions in motor vehicles in which internal combustion engines are arranged make it necessary to keep the pollutant emissions during the operation of the internal combustion engine as low as possible. This requires, inter alia, the internal combustion engine to be actuated in a beneficial fashion in order to keep low the consumption of fuel and the emission of pollutant components.
An important parameter which affects a combustion process of internal combustion engines is the exhaust gas recirculation rate, which specifies the magnitude of the proportion of exhaust gas which is fed back to the internal combustion engine for a subsequent combustion process. In order to influence the combustion process of the internal combustion engine in a beneficial way, precise determination of the exhaust gas recirculation rate is necessary.